It used to be said that the British could smuggle more filth past Auntie Beeb with a raised eyebrow than an American stand-up could manage with an entire thesaurus of obscenities. That was the charm of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue and its siblings – the art lay in suggestion, not in shouting anatomical facts down the microphone like a doctor on a stag night.
Somewhere along the way, that changed. The watershed – once a line in the sand – now feels like a quaint relic from the era of three channels and the shipping forecast. What was formerly unbroadcastable is now tossed into pre-dinner radio comedy as casually as a garnish. Perfectly ordinary presenters, who once tiptoed around the anatomy like embarrassed schoolmasters, now happily toss in words that would have had the old BBC management clutching their clipboards in horror.
I’m no prude. I’ve spent a lifetime at sea and in boardrooms, both of which are environments where language flowers with impressive enthusiasm. But there is a difference between adults talking freely and a public broadcaster deciding that nothing is off limits before the kids have even cleared their plates. We’ve quietly slid from innuendo to explicitness, and all without the courtesy of a public announcement.
The excuse trotted out is that “people hear worse on the bus”. Possibly. But the bus is not the BBC. The BBC once understood context. It once drew a firm line between grown-up humour and the sort of stuff that leads your eight-year-old to repeat phrases at school that get you summoned to the headteacher’s office. Now it shrugs and pretends the watershed is a fussy little antique, like the Union Flag flown upside down.
What’s remarkable is how little this has to do with artistic bravery. It isn’t that the comedy has got bolder or more sophisticated. If anything, it has got lazier. Why bother with the delicate embroidery of a Humphrey Lyttelton line when you can simply name the body part and move on? Innuendo requires timing, craft, wit. Explicitness requires none of those things – just a producer who has given up caring.
So here we are. The watershed still technically exists, but only in the same way that medieval castles still technically exist – as monuments to a time when boundaries meant something. If we want to preserve a space for cleverness, subtlety and the kind of mischief that British comedy once excelled at, we might start by admitting that not all words are equal, not all times of day are the same, and not every gag needs to sound like a medical diagram read aloud.
Comedy hasn’t become braver. It has simply become noisier. And if even I think some of this stuff is better saved for after nine o’clock, you can imagine what the genuine prudes must be thinking.
Mind you, I remember the Oz Trial....
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